Most Common Passwords of Gawker Media Users

Which are the most common passwords used by Gawker Media users? Its recent news that Gawker Media’s servers were hacked, resulting in a security breach at Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker, Jezebel, io9, Jalopnik, Kotaku, and Deadspin as user email and passwords details of millions of users became available online.

The passwords were originally encrypted, but 188279 passwords were decoded and made public by hackers. WSJ used the dataset and prepared a list of the 50 most-popular Gawker Media passwords.

Most common passwords

So what are the common passwords used by the tech savvy readers of these top blogs. Can you guess?

As you can see, 123456 is the commonest password used by most readers by far. The next common password is “password“. Some tried a longer number 12345678. Other common number variations are 111111 and 12345.

So why did people use these passwords? Because they are easy to remember. But such simple passwords can be easily guessed and allow unauthorized access to anyone. Moreover, if you keep the same email as username and same simple password across multiple services like email, bank accounts etc – then anyone who guesses it, can access all your accounts.